


Living Legends

by Alyndra



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Demigod Dean Winchester, Demigod Sam Winchester, Gen, Murder, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 13, Soul-Eating, quasi-cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 03:22:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16589894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alyndra/pseuds/Alyndra
Summary: Sam and Dean live happily ever after, worshipped as gods by readers of the Winchester Gospels, dispensing advice to young hunters from the Bunker; surely it's all too good to be true?





	Living Legends

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the first ever Supernatural Eldritch Bang _(for the eerie, creepy and unnatural)_ on [Tumblr](https://spneldritchbang.tumblr.com/) and [LiveJournal](https://spneldritchbang.livejournal.com/)! Many thanks to Sandy79 for the [cover art and divider](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16598558) \- isn't it cool? - and to the awesome Julia_Sets for betaing and helping me make it so much better! I'm excited because this is my first proper Bang challenge, as opposed to Reversebangs or exchanges, which are fun too, of course!
> 
> Warnings: very morally ambiguous Winchesters. Questionably happy ending. Read responsibly.

The young man entered the bunker warily. They were all wary these days. He wore skintight modern clothing, flashing colorful patterns; Dean wondered if he was even over twenty.

“Hi,” Dean said, and the kid jumped. “You’ve made it to Hunter Central.”

“I — I...” the kid stuttered. Too much time staring at screens these days, and kids grew up hardly able to put two words together, Dean thought grumpily. Uncharitably. 

“I’ve come to recognize the great hunters Sam and Dean Winchester,” he finally said, all in one breath and too formal. “Your heroic deeds fill many books, and I have been inspired by them to become a hunter, saving people and killing things.”

“Sam!” Dean called down the hall. “We’ve got another guest!”

Sam ambled in from the back bookshelves, looking washed-out, like he hadn’t seen the sun in way too long.

The new kid was staring around at the old fifties tech that still stood in the bunker. Dean figured he’d probably never seen anything like it.

“Hey,” Sam said, and the kid jumped again. Sam politely pretended he didn’t see it. “One of Jody’s grandkids is in trouble again,” he told Dean. He frowned into the distance for a moment; trouble in the southwest, maybe. “I handled it,” he added. His eyes refocused on their guest. “So who’s this?”

“I’m Tristan, Tristan Wolfsbane,” the new kid said.

Sam frowned. “Was that the name you were born with?”

He flushed. “I’m taking the name Wolfsbane because I’m a hunter now, and my old last name doesn’t matter. But I’ve always been Tristan,” he said a little defiantly.

Sam nodded slightly; _Continue._

“Anyway, I brought you something,” Tristan went on quickly. He pulled a glass jar out of his shoulderbag. A soft light glowed inside it. “It was a ghost haunting the skatepark, from a boy who broke his neck.”

“Thank you,” Sam said gravely. He took the jar with a ghost-soul in it and set it behind him on the map table. “This is a good place to bring things like that. You can take some empty soul-jars with you when you leave, if you like,” he added, waving at a stack of them off to one side of the door.

Tristan bowed. “Thank you for placing your faith in me. I won’t fail you.” He stood up a little straighter, and finally looked ready to spit out whatever he’d come about. 

It was never just for the pleasure of their company, Dean reflected. 

“I’ve come because my brother was murdered,” the kid said at last. 

“What’s dead stays dead,” Dean warned him. 

“I know,” he said, a trace of indignance. “I just want the monster that killed him dead.”

Dean relaxed a bit. “That, we can help with. Do you need help finding it, identifying it, or in how to kill it?”

The kid shook his head. “I think I know who did it. But she’s denying it. I think she’s lying, but how can I be sure?”

Dean exchanged glances with Sam. An interesting request; not one of the typical ones. But not a challenging answer. 

“You can use a truth serum if you can get her to drink it, or cast a spell if you’ve got the mojo for it,” Sam said. “Otherwise, you might have to hire a witch or psychic.”

“Truth serum?” The boy looked hopeful.

“Yeah, I think we’ve got a vial made up somewhere around here,” Dean said, turning to frown thoughtfully at the shelves. “Here we go.” He crossed to pluck a tiny bottle up and tossed it easy, underhanded, to Tristan, who half leaped out of his skin to catch it in a panic.

“If that’s all?” Sam was already turning back, attention on the books he’d left; Tristan bowed and thanked them as he was backing up the stairs to the door, and Dean was fairly sure it turned to active fleeing as soon as the door shut behind him.

He snorted idly. “Think we should set one of Jody’s grandkids to watch that one?”

Sam hummed absently. “There aren’t any very close, and most of them are busy. Is it worth making somebody drive across the country?”

“Nah, guess not,” Dean said. “Hey, you should eat that before you go back to work; I know how long it’s been since you had anything, and you’re looking kind of pale.”

Sam rolled his eyes a little, as he always had when Dean wanted him to take care of himself, but he nodded and picked up the glass jar to look at it.

“Wonder how long the kid was a ghost for,” he said, then he shrugged and unscrewed the lid. The fragile white soul-light started to hover up out of the jar, and Sam raised it to his mouth and downed it in one swallow. “Mm, pretty young, I’d say.”

“That’s the spirit,” Dean cracked, just to hear Sam groan and flip him off for the bad pun. Sam’s color was looking much healthier now. His face was still young and his body strong, just the same as he’d looked for a long, long time now.

For Sam, consuming souls had started with the demon blood. 

The blood was just a physical representation, of course. What he was really sucking down was power: the power of the demon soul itself. Just a little, of course, especially at first; not enough to really damage Ruby, just …tapping in to what she was willing to give him. What Azazel had given him as an infant, in even tinier quantity.

But it didn't really matter if that kind of power was given willingly or not, it turned out: he consumed the power of other demon souls readily enough, once he had the trick of it. 

And yeah, he stopped doing it, too; stayed on the wagon (mostly) for decades and lived like a normal human, with only his naturally allotted strength and substance, no matter how easy it would have been, sometimes, to part his lips and let it come flooding in.

Killing demons was God's work, he reminded himself. Fighting evil. Even if God hadn't really been there for them most of the time, they'd gotten to meet him, and that was more than most people did. So Sam used no more power than it took to keep the flinging-Winchesters-into-walls shit down, and stabbed them with Ruby's knife, and prayed to God, and didn't drink the sweet red blood bubbling out of them under his hands.

Time went by at the Winchesters’ bunker. Tristan was successful in his hunt; he came by to thank them, and dropped off another glass jar, this one with the soul of the kitsune girl who’d killed his brother. Sam shook his head: killing a human being, just for their pituitary gland — it seemed so wasteful. Amy had proven it was possible to live off the recently deceased. With monsters no longer secret, there was no reason kitsunes couldn’t get responsibly sourced meals to sustain them.

With two successful hunts under Tristan’s belt, Dean put Jody’s grandkids in contact with him, so they could start feeling him out for membership. But it was all moot a couple weeks later, because the kid had barely started his next hunt when something killed him, the little psychic thread that Sam tied to all of their hunters going suddenly dark and cold.

Dean sighed when Sam told him. “Poor kid. We’d better put someone else on the hunt; can’t have a monster get away with murdering one of ours.”

“His contact already had his location, I’ll let him know.” Sam’s eyes went distant for a moment as he reached along a different psychic thread, carefully shaping his message and then letting it arrow into another mind. Faintly, he felt it being received. It was that easy. He opened his eyes and turned back to Dean. “Ronnie’s on it.”

Dean nodded. “Good.” He stood and stretched. “Hey, when was the last time we went for a drive? We’ve been cooped up in here for a year, it seems like.” Ever since automated grocery delivery by drone had become a thing, there was barely any point in going to a store anymore. Most of them were closed by now.

“Not quite,” Sam tilted his head, considering. “Eight months, give or take. Want to catch a concert?”

Dean shook his head. “Nobody makes good music anymore,” he complained.

“What about that punk kid, Tallyhosen?” Sam asked. “I thought you liked him.”

“Yeah, he was good, he could do the classics,” Dean said. “But he died three years back, why do you think I haven’t brought up a concert before now?”

“Oh,” Sam said. “Damn. They all go so quickly.”

Dean just nodded; it was true.

“Well, maybe we could visit Jody’s grandkids,” Sam suggested.

Jody’s grandkids was just what Sam and Dean liked to call the group; it had started out that way, just her adopted kids and their kids, and other hunters that got adopted in along the way. But all the original members had been lifetimes ago; there were still some great-great-grandkids of their original friends in the organization, mixed in with people who got inspired reading the Winchester Gospels and decided to devote their lives to following Sam and Dean. A lot of them renamed themselves after people in the book series: they’d seen a lot of Donnas and Ellens and Jodys and Bobbys and even Crowleys come through. 

It was all more than a little cultish, but they did good work at Hunting, so Dean only complained a little — 

“You complained for three solid decades that they were getting too wrapped up in their own rhetoric,” Sam said, catching the drift of his thought.

“Stay outta my head, Sammy,” Dean said, no real heat behind it. “I always get the feeling we’re disturbing them on a deep spiritual level when we’re dropping by.”

“We probably are,” Sam said. “They don’t call themselves Acolytes of the Immortal Winchester Brotherhood for nothing.” 

“Just because we’re their gods doesn’t mean they have to _act_ like it,” Dean said petulantly.

They'd hunted more than a fair smattering of pagan gods in twentyish years of hunting. This case didn't start out any weirder than their usual, except for what she said when they finally caught up to her. 

"Well done, godlings," she said. "Many an age has it been since I have been called to account."

"Godlings?" Dean couldn't help wrinkling his face up. "We're just mortals. Sorry, lady."

Her brow wrinkled as well, delicately. "You may call me Idunn. The immortality of the gods was ever my business. I see your persons plainly now before my eyes: do not lie."

Dean exchanged glances with Sam. His own was baffled; Sam looked like he was dredging through his mental encyclopedia of folklore: "Old Nordic, one of the Aesir, keeper of apples?"

"Yes, of course, the apples of eternal youth," she said impatiently. Seeing that they looked no more enlightened than before, she sighed. "Don't tell me no one's given you the talk yet."

Sam looked at Dean. "What talk?"

"The birds and bees sex one?" Dean tried, without much hope. 

Idunn rolled her eyes, flipping long blonde hair behind her shoulder. "No. The 'how gods are born' talk."

Dean choked on his first two responses. "Ummm... Not like people are born?"

"We all start out as mortal humans, child," she said. "Great kings, or heroes: those whose lives shine like beacons amidst a crowd; fathers and mothers of dynasties; magic-wielders, protectors of our people. Those whose people will not let them go—We gods are fed on the energy of their souls. It is what makes us immortal and gives us powers beyond the ordinary.”

“Nobody’s worshipping us,” Sam frowned. “And we wouldn’t be — feeding off their souls, even if they were.” His face screwed up in rejection of the whole idea. 

She laughed delicately at him. “Once you have the trick of drinking in a soul, you cannot unlearn it,” she said firmly. “Monsters can feed in one way only, narrowly prescribed, perhaps a specific body part they must get their strength from. But for someone who remains human and yet learns to take in soul-energy — It doesn’t matter what kind of soul or who sacrificed it for your strength. It matters that you drew energy from another. And as surely as Odin set me to guarding the secrets of the gods’ power and how to imbibe it, I can see in your veins the taste, the hunger for the nourishment of the gods. Both of you have feasted on souls."

* * *

For Dean, although sojourning in Hell taught him how to rip a soul apart, it wasn't until Purgatory that he learned to feed off of them, to take strength from those he killed. There wasn't anything else to eat there, after all, and unlike in Hell, he'd still had a physical body to maintain. The only source of anything in Purgatory was souls. So Dean learned to chow down: the more he killed, the stronger he got. He couldn't afford to be weak, not in here: it would mean he got eaten instead, and then he'd be leaving Cas alone to fend for himself. Not to mention Benny, who was steadily becoming a comrade-in-arms if not a friend.

Starving himself to weakness wasn't a moral stand he could afford to take, that was all. 

But once he was out, it was like he could still feel the energy of the souls, in the moment of death, every time he killed a monster: bleeding away, diffuse, uncertain; waiting to be gathered up, consumed. He told himself it was ridiculous: the souls were just going to Purgatory anyway, no matter what he did, if he just took a little bite from that pulsing, glowing energy, surely he'd earned it with his hard-earned victory —

Instead, he refused that energy when it came near him, and after a little while, it would flurry off. Well, at least it wasn't in Dean's court anymore. 

Killing started feeling different after he took the Mark, though. There was a vicious hunger that could only be satisfied with that moment of soul-bleed, when he took a life: but the souls themselves didn't float off anymore. Instead they got sucked down into him. Not into Dean himself: no, they drained away into the Mark on his arm. He couldn't feel them anymore once they'd gone. 

But every time, the Mark seemed to pulse just a little bit stronger. It freaked Dean out, to be honest: but damn if he was going to let on about it, to anyone. 

Instead he went home with Sam, and ignored the Mark as much as he could, especially when it whispered to him how much brighter the human souls glowed than monsters did, or ghosts, or demons. _They would be so delicious …_

"Wanna go to the farmer's market?" he asked instead, stomach roiling sickly. 

Sam looked up from his study table, sniffed the air out of habit, and there was the familiar flash of disappointment as he didn't smell what he was searching for. He hid it almost well enough for Dean not to notice. Almost. 

It didn't matter though. Dean knew what Sam was missing. He'd have had to be blind not to notice, the whole time they'd had Crowley locked behind the bookshelves here. Yeah, Dean had noticed how Sam would take deep breaths, looking like he was smelling fresh-baking bread or something instead of Hell-stinking, sulfurous corruption. The smell of demons. Sometimes he'd find excuses to linger in the books near Crowley's cell, pretending he was just reading there by coincidence if Dean happened on him. Dean knew the look though. Sam wanted something like he wanted food or drink or sex. Except, Sam was usually more indifferent to that kind of bodily need. 

It never came to anything, that Dean could tell: Sam wasn't falling off the wagon again. So Dean stopped worrying about it (much) and didn't say anything when Sam took out demons on a hunt with unusually vicious efficiency. 

Later, when Dean succumbed to the Mark and became a demon himself, he could see Sam's nostrils flaring every time he came near, greedily sucking in the scent of power and potential. But Sam didn't say anything, didn't make a move, and Dean wound up waiting a bit too long for the right moment to really rub his face in it.

It was weird, seeing Sam look at him like he was prey. That was all. He'd hunted alongside his brother all their lives, but — guess you never really quite knew a guy after all. 

The Mark raged on his arm, telling his demonic nature that he was stronger than Sam, that he could take him. Sam should _fear_ him. The brightness of Sam's soul would feed the Mark for weeks. 

But only one of them was currently chained to a chair, and it wasn't Sam. Dean told the Mark to shut up before it got him into any more trouble. 

So, they got past that. Obviously. But then Amara got out, and even though the Mark was gone from his arm, killing still felt — off, not back to normal. He couldn't think about anything but Amara, especially when he was destroying things. He’d sense the soul, in the instant of death, all delicate confused waiting and shimmering with its recently extinguished life, and he’d wish Amara could be here to see it. How she'd probably love seeing the life fade out of their eyes, feel the monster's blood pulsing warm over his hands… 

And the soul would go off in a more _aimed_ sort of way, after that. So he had the nasty feeling she was still getting the benefit of all his kills; just like, in hindsight, she must have been sucking down everything that he unknowingly fed her through the Mark. He hated himself afterwards, but evil shit still needed killing; he wasn’t going to stop hunting, so what the fuck was he supposed to do?

Another month, another young man knocking on their door. This one was dressed less flashily, and his eyes darted less, but Dean thought they took in more. He was calm but alert, and he barely jumped at all when Dean introduced himself. 

Maybe he’d last longer than Tristan had; that would be nice. 

He hadn’t brought them a soul to eat. That had used to be more common, back when their friends knew they were welcome anytime; uneasily, Dean wondered when the last time someone had visited them without a gift was. 

Well, it wasn’t an official rule or anything that they had to bring something. And even if it had been official, Dean approved of rule-breaking in general. 

“So, your name? And what can we help you with?” Dean asked, once Sam arrived. 

“I am Thaddeus,” he said. “I need to avenge my sister’s murder.”

“It’s always something like that,” Dean muttered. “Go on.”

“She offended a so-called god,” Thaddeus told them. “What can you tell me that might help?”

“An uncommon request.” Sam bit his lip thoughtfully. “A lot depends on which god you’re dealing with,” he said. “Can you tell us who she pissed off?”

Thaddeus shook his head. 

“Okay, well, gods in general tend to be rigid in their thinking. Insular; they tend to not engage with much much with anything outside their comfort zone. Most of that’s probably just from how long they’ve lived. They figure they’ve seen it all already, and they’re interested in their sacrifices and the respect people give them, their sphere of influence, and not much else.”

“What did your sister do?” Dean asked. “Do you know?”

Thaddeus hesitated. “She killed someone under their protection -- but he attacked her when she was walking home alone, because he was a filthy rapist. He deserved to die! But his brother appealed to their gods for revenge, and they granted him their aid. He killed my sister.” Grief flashed across his face. 

Sam and Dean exchanged glances. “And where is this brother now?” Dean asked slowly, suspicions forming.

“I killed him,” Thaddeus said plainly. “And I’m going to kill the gods who helped him, too. He suspected my sister, but he would never have acted without proof. Their interference signed her death warrant.”

“We’d certainly like to help you,” Sam said, even though Dean wasn’t at all sure of that anymore. “What if the gods didn’t know your sister’s story, when they aided your enemy?”

“Then they should have bothered to find out!” It was an anguished cry. “Her attacker and his brother had rap sheets a mile long, registered sex offender, assault and battery, you name it. A two-minute search on the Web would have turned up enough to make anyone suspicious.”

“That stuff isn’t always reliable,” Dean said, but it was a weak defense and he knew it. They’d been sloppy, handing out favors without any background on people. And this was what it got them.

“Then what is?” The kid was staring Dean down now, grieving but steady. “How do you make sure no one ever kills an innocent on your behalf again?”

“You’ve gotta be on the ground, get to know people…” But they hadn’t operated like that, really, for too many decades to count. Suddenly Sam’s description of gods seemed all too immediate: rigid, insular, unengaged. Kill the monsters, if they were killing people: that was the rule, and following it generally worked.

Except here this young man was, throwing it back in their faces, like they’d done something wrong. 

“I’m sorry,” Sam said. “But we’re not really talking about other gods, are we?” 

When had Sam become the direct one? The young man didn’t bother to deny it. “By your own rules, will you agree that you deserve to die for causing an innocent death?”

“Hell no, we don’t agree,” Dean said quickly.

“It’s not that simple,” said Sam.

After Lucifer’s death, when Dean was gone with Michael in the driver’s seat, Sam started to feel soul-energy hovering around him at odd moments. When he didn’t do anything, the feeling would dissipate after a while.

It only made sense when he connected the hovering soul with the fact that Michael had recently killed people. Suddenly he got a whiff of Dean — like Dean had _directed_ the soul to him, somehow, out of the deaths Michael was causing. 

Of course Dean was doing that, if he could get away with it. Sam nearly smiled. But he didn’t need to eat some poor soul who’d gotten in Michael’s way. He waited for it to go off wherever souls went when they didn’t get eaten. That was between them and their reaper, he guessed.

But not even a week later he came face-to-face with Michael as he was rampaging through a den of human trafficking scumbags, and he could feel Dean sending him one soul after another, almost desperately.

The place was filled with a miasma of human fear and pain and suffering even when there weren’t any victims there, a reek that had suffused it long before Michael got here. Sam couldn’t work up much indignation, in this particular case, that the criminals responsible for ruining lives in batches were getting slaughtered in Michael’s quest to cleanse humanity of sin.

Was Dean _picking_ the souls that didn’t deserve to go to heaven out, somehow, to send to Sam? Could he tell, had he picked up some angelic trick of looking into people’s hearts? Or was he just making decisions based on context?

How desperate did Sam have to be to take him up on it? The thought of eating a soul was repulsive, but would he die fighting first?

It wasn’t an abstract question. Michael was running out of bodies and would probably notice Sam any minute now, and Sam didn’t have the ability to kill him. He had holy oil and he’d drawn a circle, set up to trap him, with a banishing sigil set up behind him in case that didn’t work, but he didn’t want to banish Michael. He wanted him out of his brother.

If only Dean were stronger, he could resist Michael. Sam knew what it took: he’d resisted Lucifer, though barely and not right away. He didn’t blame Dean for Michael’s strength. 

Kicking out Gadreel, a weakened rank-and-file angel, had been easy by comparison. 

The cloud of souls still buzzed uselessly around Sam’s head. If only Sam could make Dean stronger, he knew Dean could kick Michael out from the inside, but how…?

“Go back to Dean, he’s the one that needs you,” Sam mouthed at the souls, angry that he was crouching here helpless, with Michael about to discover him and a plan that had little chance of working. Michael would know his tricks as well as Dean knew them. And without tricks, Michael hopelessly outpowered him.

To his amazement, they actually did flutter off all at once. Sam stood there gaping. But then he shrugged. Whether Dean chose to accept them or not, the ball was in Dean’s court.

Two minutes later, as Michael stood, lifting Sam by the neck and choking the life out of him while his legs kicked uselessly, he wondered if he’d made a bad call, if he’d doomed himself and Dean and the world to Michael’s crusade. Michael’s eyes were cold and merciless, staring into Sam’s as his vision fuzzed…

And then those eyes changed, struggled, softened, became _Dean_ again, and suddenly Sam could _breathe_. “Dean,” he gasped.

“Yeah, Sammy,” Dean said. “I got him. Thanks for the boost.”

So sending the souls to Dean _had_ worked. Sam swallowed queasily, not sure he wanted to think too closely about it.

But he was grateful to be alive.

“What are we going to do with Michael?” he asked.

Dean smiled grimly. “I spent some time in the library, while I was stuck in his head. Caught up on my reading.” He grabbed a plastic peanut butter jar from the air as it came flying to him and narrowed his eyes as he started etching enochian into it with his finger.

Being Dean, he also swiped a fingerful out of the mostly-empty jar and stuck it in his mouth.

When he was done, he took out Michael’s archangel blade and made a cut on his arm. Blue-white grace started dribbling down into the jar.

“He doesn’t like this at all,” Dean told Sam. “He’s thrashing like crazy.” But Dean held his arm steadily over the jar while the grace drained away into it.

When the jar was nearly full of swirling blue-white energy, Dean lidded it and healed the cut with a hand over it. “I’ve left you barely more than a regular angel has,” he said out loud to the air. “If you don’t get out of me now, you’ll lose more. If you bother us again, you’ll die. Go run Heaven and stay out of Earth’s hair. Sam, cover your eyes,” he added, as light began to leak around the edges of his silhouette.

Sam did, but the feeling of an angel leaving its host was unmistakable. He withstood the earth-trembling _presence_ until it was gone, and then he opened his eyes, joyfully, to find Dean stumbling into his arms, whole and hale and _safe_ , and if this was what the souls of this rathole of human slavers, vermin who didn’t deserve to live anyway, could buy? Then Sam regretted _nothing_.

* * *

After that, it was almost too easy. An angry ghost trapped them by bringing a building down on them when they were in the basement; there was a wall that had fallen on Dean, a broken leg at least and maybe more he couldn’t see in the darkness, and Sam could feel the vengeful spirit’s enery buzzing at them, a sad little ball of rage and budding insanity. Where before, he might have cowered in a ring of salt or blasted it with cold iron, now he -- he knew the boundaries of his own soul a little better, perhaps. He didn’t have to wait for the ghost to will inanimate objects to hurt him and his brother anymore; he was more than just his body. Sam reached out and wrestled it out of the air, crushed the rage and shadows down and wadded them up into a little glowing ball like the souls he’d seen before, and then he opened his mouth and drank it down. 

The ghost shouldn’t have been killing people. 

Well, it had just tried to kill the wrong people. Sam would have burned it without hesitation. Once, he’d taken comfort from thinking restless spirits might find a place in heaven. Dean had been more likely to hope they were getting what they deserved in Hell, for the trouble they caused to the living.

But these days, Sam had seen far too much of both Heaven and Hell to feel good about sending a soul to either place.

It could just help him undo the mess it had put them in, instead of Sam trying to dig himself and his injured brother out without bringing the whole place down on their heads, or waiting for a rescue: unlikely, considering nobody knew they were here, or lived close enough to notice the house falling in. 

Sam raised his hands, feeling fresh energy coursing through his veins, like the old demon-blood days but without the feeling of _filth_ that demons always carried. The ghost’s anger wasn’t concentrated by centuries of Hell; it easily sloughed off, leaving the soul’s energy shining pure and bright. With that energy, it was easy for Sam to find a way out from under the debris, lifting a piece here and there when necessary, carrying Dean easily without jostling his leg.

He and Dean had been through so much together, Heaven and Hell and everything in between. It wasn’t going to be some two-bit ghost that brought them down. 

They were always going to do what it took to save each other.

“We do a lot of good in the world, keeping monsters from killing people,” Sam said to Thaddeus. “Yeah, we made a mistake this time, but that’s the exception, not the rule.”

“And if a monster makes ‘a mistake,’ just once, and kills someone?” Thaddeus asked, voice thick with anger but under control. “Then they die. As you should die.”

“We’ve made exceptions for monsters’ mistakes, too, in the past,” Dean said. “Everybody makes mistakes.” It had been a long time since their last exception, but that was just because Sam and Dean had gotten so good at what they did. They weren’t usually wrong anymore.

“Your followers don’t like _exceptions,_ ” Thaddeus spat. “They go on and on about following The Winchester Gospel, and if we don’t behave the way they think we should, it’s fire and blood and death for any so-called ‘monster’ who dares defend themselves!”

Sam sighed. “We can get on them if they’re getting out of line, but at the end of the day, they make their own decisions. We can’t control what people want to do.”

Thaddeus looked incredulous. “If not you, then who can? They worship you!”

“Yeah, and they wouldn’t stop doing _that_ when we told’em to, either,” Dean said. “Listen, Thaddeus, I feel for you. I really do. But your sister’s dead because of an honest mistake. Accept our apologies and leave here. We’ll forgive you killing one of ours, and we’ll make sure everybody knows not to go after you for it.”

“No,” Thaddeus took a resolute breath and squared his shoulders. “I can’t. I won’t give up that easily. Would you have, if somebody killed your brother? _Could_ you have walked away with an _apology_?”

“No,” Dean said heavily. Everybody knew that much about him. 

“No,” Sam agreed. “But there must be some other way...”

Castiel watched Sam and Dean taking out a whole fucked-up family of ghosts. Sam and Dean should have been showing visible signs of aging for the last thirty years, but they fought on, young and hale. They barely had to think about what they were doing, these days, and father mother sister brother all got sucked up into Sam and Dean one by one. 

“Hey, we had to keep our strength up for the fight,” was all the excuse Dean provided, after.

“The fight was already over when you ate the last one,” Cas observed. “You could have let that one go.”

“You mean the one who liked to melon-ball the eyes of their vics, right?” Dean pretended to think. “Not the one who decorated Christmas trees with intestine garlands?” 

Cas sighed. “I am the last person to judge you, after how I sustained myself on other angels’ grace.”

“We didn’t think you were trying to judge,” Sam said.

“Maybe a little,” Dean muttered. He still got defensive about what they did, even after thirty years of it. They should be grey and slow now, but instead they still looked in the prime of their lives.

“Maybe a little,” Cas repeated. “Have you thought about what eating souls is turning you into? How many years would you go on like this?”

Dean shrugged. “Something’ll kill us one way or another. Someday. I’ve always known we’re not going down peaceful.”

“If nothing’s managed it to date, I wouldn’t count on it ever happening,” Cas said with exasperation. “You’re not exactly mortal anymore, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Of course we notice,” Sam said. “Kids we watched grow up are starting to look older than us, our mom actually looks like our mom again —”

“And you avoid them, to spare yourselves and them the discomfort of thinking about why that is,” Cas said. “I am still here. But that is because I will never age, as humans do.”

They were both staring at him, trying to figure out his direction.

“I was loyal to God for millennia,” Castiel said. “You needn’t fear I will abandon you, no matter what you eat.”

“Millennia,” Dean laughed uneasily. “Cas, you’re not seriously talking about us lasting _that_ long…”

“I think he is, Dean.” Sam could almost pierce Cas with his gaze. Cas wondered if he was beginning to see grace shining from the worn edges of his vessel. It would not be obvious yet, not for years to come, but Sam always did see what others could not.

“You two have made the list of things that could kill you a very, very short one,” Cas said. “As long as you don’t get greedy, the potential consequences could be — far-reaching.” 

Sam and Dean exchanged glances. “That last soul…” Sam began.

Cas shrugged. “I am only telling you that for my part, it does not matter. I could be killed tomorrow, but as long as I live I am yours, both of yours. This vessel will not last indefinitely — vessels are fragile things; I expect it to wear out in a few hundred years — but by then, my true form will hardly disturb you.“

”Do we _have_ to think about the future? It’s making my brain hurt,” Dean complained. “Taking it one day at a time’s worked great, so far.”

“No,” Cas said quietly. “Of course you don’t have to.”

“Good,” Dean said, and turned to the car.

“There’s no hurry,” Cas explained to Sam, because Sam was still listening.

“No. I don’t imagine there is,” Sam said, very thoughtfully.

“Stop pretending.” Thaddeus said. “You hole up in here like the world hasn’t moved on outside. Everybody knows the stories, how Sam and Dean saved Earth from demons and angels, once upon a time.”

“We did,” Sam said.

“But there aren’t any demons left, or rogue angels, either. Just humans and monsters,” Thaddeus said. “You’re past your time, and the world doesn’t need you anymore.”

“There’s still plenty to hunt,” Dean growled.

“Human deaths by monster are so low they make national news, now,” Thaddeus said. “We _monsters_ cower and simper up to the hunters. We shouldn’t have to be kicked, beaten, and raped every time there’s a missing person, whether it’s supernatural or not. But nothing changes, because we all know we’ll be killed if we fight back.”

“If we weren’t here, how long would it be before monsters started thinking they could run the whole show?” Dean said sharply.

“Monsters are running it now!” Thaddeus flung back at them. “You just aren’t honest enough to look at what you really are! _I’ve_ never killed any innocents, my _sister_ never killed any innocents...”

“This is getting old,” Dean said. “We’re not going to kill you unless you make us. But if you _are_ planning to, get on with it.”

Thaddeus smiled grimly. “Down with bloody gods,” he said, and touched his thumb to his pinky.

There was a thunderous BOOM in the main room of the bunker, and Dean was knocked backwards off his feet. A giant fireball swept over him from where Thaddeus had stood, burning his face. Once he could open his eyes again, everything he could see was blackened or charred, where it wasn’t on fire. No one could have stood through that; back when they were human, he didn’t think they’d have lived through it. “Sam?”

“Here, Dean.” Sam had been knocked backward too. “Castiel?” he called. 

With a familiar rush of power, their angel stood over them protectively. His vessel had worn fragile and transparent over time, and grace glowed blue from under his skin. His eyes were shining twin beacons in the darkness, and Cas’ great shadowy wings no longer tucked themselves neatly out of the mortal world: they backwashed air around the room when he moved.

“Good to see you, buddy,” Dean said. That much leaking grace would once have set them reeling, covering their eyes and ears. But now it was just a pleasant sense of their friend. “But I think this little problem is about to get resolved.”

They all stared at the center of the room, where Thaddeus still stood, staggered and hair burnt off. But he was whole, despite being the epicenter of the blast. One of those fancy new fire-protective suits, or a spell? Dean supposed it didn’t much matter.

“You brought in a gas leak,” Sam was all academic interest _still_ , but Thaddeus shook his head to clear his senses and rushed toward Sam, leveling a short wooden spear. The time for talking was over.

Cas flicked himself and Sam across the room with a sweep of one wing, but Dean was ready to deal with their interloper. He stuck out a hand and Thaddeus was yanked off his feet, flying backwards until he hit the wall headfirst, neck breaking with a sharp _crack_. “Sorry, kid, but you don’t get to mess with Sammy. Rule number one,” Dean said softly. When monsters broke the rules, they were fair game for hunters; that had always been Dean’s code. 

Sam furrowed his eyebrows at Dean’s overprotectiveness. “Overkill, much? I could have handled...” He looked around at the bunker and sighed. “This is going to take a month to clean up.”

“Yeah, I know you could have,” Dean said. He rolled his eyes affectionately at Sam. “Maybe I just got antsy.” 

“Why was this creature attempting to harm you?” Cas asked.

“Revenge, mostly,” Dean said. “Sam’ll be happy to fill you in.”

“He thought we weren’t a net benefit to the world anymore,” Sam said, looking troubled. “Maybe… Do you think he had a point?”

“I liked the kid,” Dean admitted. “I don’t know. He had a level head on his shoulders.” He glanced over at Thaddeus’ crumpled body. “Well, to start with.” 

He strolled over to stand over it. Life hadn’t quite left, yet; there was still a struggling heartbeat, a gasping attempt at a breath. He watched it stutter. Time to finish it.

He held out his hand over the corpse, and slowly the soul-light started to overflow its container, peeling itself away from flesh and bone and coming to rest in his cupped hand.

Dean turned to Sam. “Want him?” he asked. “It’s your turn.”

Sam shook his head and sighed. “No, I wouldn’t quite feel right about it. He’s all yours.”

Dean shrugged. Sam had always been a bit of a picky eater. “Cas? I bet he’s delicious,” he offered.

“I am sufficiently fed from Heaven’s wellspring,” Cas said, dignified as always. “No, thank you.”

“I bet that’s just factory-farmed soul-energy, with the guts hidden away so the angels don’t have to think about where their food comes from,” Dean said, holding up his catch to admire the light coruscating through it. “But your loss.”

“Enjoy,” Sam said with a slight smile. Cas vanished as abruptly as he’d come; the source of heaven’s power was an old bone, picked clean and dry. Dean figured he was probably right, but a thousand years would pass before any angel would admit to it.

He and Sam had a bet going.

Dean raised Thaddeus’s soul up to his mouth and sucked him in. Rolled his head back as he felt all that fresh new energy start coursing through him, weaving in from his stomach to the rest of his body. Making him stronger.

There really wasn’t anything else like it; it made sense, why no one ever wanted to give this up.

“Yep,” Dean said. “Amazing.” He sighed. “We can be more careful, in the future,” he offered Sam. “No reason not to do a little googling on people, I guess.”

“Yeah,” said Sam. “And we really should get out more. Keep up with with the times. Everything changes. I’m glad he called us out on that stuff.”

“That gas leak thing was clever,” Dean admitted. “And the way he set it off -- combustibles on his fingertips, you think?”

“Could be,” Sam said. “If you want to stash the body in the larder, I’ll get the mop bucket.”

“You’re a hero,” Dean said. “After this mess is cleaned up, let’s go have a chat with our cult.”

“They can at least pretend to be happy to see us,” Sam agreed. 

**** ****

** IT NEVER ENDS. **


End file.
